Open Science Essentials: The Open Science Framework

Open science essentials in 2 minutes, part 2

The Open Science Framework (osf.io) is a website designed for the complete life-cycle of your research project – designing projects; collaborating; collecting, storing and sharing data; sharing analysis scripts, stimuli, results and publishing results.

Open Science is fast becoming the new standard for science. As I see it, there are two major drivers of this:

1. Distributing your results via a slim journal article dates from the 17th century. Constraints on the timing, speed and volume of scholarly communication no longer apply. In short, now there is no reason not to share your full materials, data, and analysis scripts.

2. The Replicability crisis means that how people interpret research is changing. Obviously sharing your work doesn’t automatically make it reliable, but since it is a costly signal, it is a good sign that you take the reliability of your work seriously.

You could share aspects of your work in many ways, but the OSF has many benefits

the OSF is backed by serious money & institutional support, so the online side of your project will be live many years after you publish the link

All this, and the OSF also makes easy things like version control and pre-registration.

Good science is open science. And the fringe benefit is that making materials open forces you to properly document everything, which makes you a better collaborator with your number one research partner – your future self.

Either you can timestamp your pre-registration but not make it public (which you can do via the OSF, for example), or you figure that by pre-registering your proposal you are publicly establishing that you had the idea first